Artisanal vegan cheese comes into its own

Miyoko Schinner, founder of Miyoko’s Kitchen, shows the cheese aging room. She published her first cookbook, “The Now and Zen Epicure,” in 1991.

Miyoko Schinner, founder of Miyoko’s Kitchen, shows the cheese aging room. She published her first cookbook, “The Now and Zen Epicure,” in 1991.

Photo: Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle

Photo: Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle

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Miyoko Schinner, founder of Miyoko’s Kitchen, shows the cheese aging room. She published her first cookbook, “The Now and Zen Epicure,” in 1991.

Miyoko Schinner, founder of Miyoko’s Kitchen, shows the cheese aging room. She published her first cookbook, “The Now and Zen Epicure,” in 1991.

Photo: Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle

Artisanal vegan cheese comes into its own

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Cheese caves are known for smelling bombastic, and the aging room at Miyoko’s Kitchen in Fairfax is no exception.

The aromas of dried rosemary, smoke and something akin to cheddar crowd and jostle against one another in the shiver-cool space, so concentrated that a visitor’s Pavlovian hunger pangs war with a fight-or-flight response to such pungency.

The spare white room is filled with rolling racks, each tray polka-dotted with 5-inch rounds of “cultured nut product,” as the California Department of Food and Agriculture insists the company call its vegan cheeses. Standing among the rounds is their hairnet-clad creator, who is describing how it took months to find commercial cheese cultures that weren’t grown in cow’s milk.

Miyoko Schinner’s newscaster good looks and late-night-radio voice may be familiar to the random omnivore who has stumbled across her PBS cooking show, “Vegan Mashup.” Among vegans, she is a Benjamin Franklin figure, an inventor and a stateswoman. When Miyoko’s Kitchen released its first products in September, Schinner finally began to capitalize on the artisan vegan cheese movement she helped start.

The Bay Area has become a hub of vegan cheesemaking innovation, with companies such as Kite Hill, Fromagerie Essème and Miyoko’s Kitchen.

“What is important about this new breed of vegan cheeses is that they have integrity as food,” says Gordon Edgar, head of the cheese department at Rainbow Grocery, which stocks the area’s biggest selection of the products.

The new cheesemakers’ collective goal isn’t just to supplant the rubbery, bland alternatives that have plagued vegans and the lactose-intolerant for years. In their quest to make a vegan diet more appealing, they’re attempting to answer the question: What makes cheese delicious?

Shoppers at natural-foods markets started seeing nondairy cheeses like Soya Kaas and Tofurella in the 1980s — horrific substances that disgraced the flavors of chalk and rubber. Some were made with dairy-derived casein, the protein that gives cheese its solid, stretchy, creamy and melty textures.

The vegan cheese that Miyoko Schinner made in the mid-1990s was nothing like the ones she is producing now. It was usually some sort of melty nut cream flavored with nutritional yeast and vinegar.

“You wouldn’t want to eat it on your own,” she says. “You could get away with cooking, but that’s it.”

Schinner, who became a vegetarian at age 12 and stopped eating animal products altogether in the 1980s, spent the first 15 years of her career so far ahead of the curve that no one saw the curve coming. She published “The Now and Zen Epicure,” her first cookbook, in 1991, then opened a small restaurant called Now and Zen in Japantown in 1994. Not long after her second child was almost born in front of the stoves, she sold the restaurant and used the scant proceeds to found a food company by the same name in 1997.

Success, and time out

Very quickly, Now and Zen’s first and best-known product, the UnTurkey, took off, and the Now and Zen line expanded over the next six years. Yet, despite more than $1 million in annual sales, Schinner couldn’t secure the funding to sell her products or grow any bigger. A third baby came. By 2003, she was exhausted. She sold the company for enough money to pay off her debts and, as she puts it, “fell out of the food arena for a few years.”

In the years that Schinner lingered around the edge of the arena, writing cookbooks and teaching classes, she encountered a new kind of cashew-nut cheese at raw-foods restaurants like Roxanne’s and Cafe Gratitude. It was cultured with acidophilis strains or rejuvelac (a fermented grain drink) instead of soured with vinegar and flavor-boosted with miso or nutritional yeast.

Still, it tasted nowhere near the cheeses that she fantasized about from her pre-vegan days, the ones you could smear over a piece of baguette, a glass of Nuits-Saint-Georges at your elbow.

“I decided to spend a year focused on creating cheese,” Schinner says. All through 2010, Schinner experimented in her home kitchen, bypassing the raw foodists’ rudimentary recipes. She inhaled dairy cheesemaking books and videos. She concocted batches that she would stick in the back of the fridge for four weeks, eight weeks, four months.

In early 2012, a vegetarian publisher in Tennessee published “Artisan Vegan Cheese.” The book became a Very Big Deal.

“When Miyoko’s book came out,” says Laura Beck, founder of the Bay Area website Vegansaurus, “we were all going out to buy these bizarre ingredients to make vegan cheese because we wanted it so badly.”

Schinner’s recipes influenced a generation of cheesemakers that has emerged in the past four years, such as Punk Rawk Labs in Minneapolis, Vtopian in Eugene, Ore., Heidi Ho in Portland, Ore., and Vromage in Los Angeles.

Shane Stanbridge and Marie Chia, an Oakland couple who throw dinner parties and cook for private clients under the name S+M Vegan Chefs, also used Miyoko’s method as the starting point for their new business making a line of cream cheeses.

“We took Miyoko’s recipes and stripped those down a little bit,” Stanbridge says. They debuted in March as Fromagerie Essème (Chia was raised in France). Their process involves soaked cashews, a gluten-free amaranth rejuvelac they concoct themselves, and powerful VitaMix blenders. The results, whether plain or flavored with garlic and herbs, are so similar to dairy cheese in texture and flavor that catching the quiet presence of nuts requires a double taste.

Vegans everywhere

Schinner says that when she finally decided to re-enter the world of food manufacturing, the market had changed. Vegan food had gone mainstream.

Concern over the impact of factory farming was no longer limited to PETA members. The “Skinny Bitch” books introduced a generation of younger diners to the idea that vegan food conferred good health and slinkier dress sizes. Even Bill Clinton went

vegan.

“(In the 1990s) it was hard to be vegan in a nonvegan world without some sort of support,” Schinner says. “The Internet helped connect people.” Now there were hundreds of recipe blogs, websites like Vegansaurus (which sees 100,000 monthly visitors) and cookbooks, not to mention Instagram accounts and Twitter feeds.

Given her reputation, Schinner was easily able to tap into this swirl of energy. She brought her cheeses to fundraisers for animal-rights organizations and vegetarian conferences, and each appearance inspired ecstatic gluttony. “People lose their minds over Miyoko,” says Essème’s Stanbridge.

Seth Tibbott, creator of the Tofurkey — and formerly Now and Zen’s No. 1 rival — flew Schinner up to his Oregon plant to do a tasting. Tibbott was so impressed that he became a major investor, as did Hodo Soy co-CEO Billy Bramblett, who later left Hodo to become Schinner’s chief of operations.

A year ago, Schinner finally encountered the business partner who would help her form a proper company: Lisa Shanower, founder of Marin Magazine. It took the pair 10 months to set up a production facility, gain state approval, and consult with dairy cheesemakers on how to work safely and consistently.

For many vegans, the drive to replace cheese is ideological as well as emotional. “One thing I hear quite a bit is, 'I would be a vegan if it weren’t for cheese,’” says Beck of Vegansaurus. “Cheese has a pull over people. It’s melty and delicious and people become obsessed with it.”

But what defines cheese?

If you’re Kite Hill’s Tal Ronnen, author of “The Conscious Cook” and chef at Crossroads Cafe in Los Angeles, it’s about process. He believes cheese is made by introducing enzymes and cultures to milk, whether that milk comes from macadamias or goats.

New technique

Ronnen founded Kite Hill after a biochemist from Stanford introduced him to an enzyme that would curdle almond milk much as rennet does animal milk, something that no one had done before.

Ronnen and his partners set up a plant in Hayward and secured a ton of funding, as well as an agreement to distribute their cheeses exclusively to Whole Foods. In addition to their soft, fresh “artisan almond-milk products,” with a delicate tang and a fluffy texture, they’ve been able to produce a bloomy-rind cheese that resembles a pale, waifish Brie.

Philip Tong, professor of dairy science at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, says that whether you’re culturing nut milk, like Kite Hill, or introducing cheese cultures into cashew purees, like Miyoko’s Kitchen, you can’t get an exact replica. “You can get some lactic acid as long as there’s a carbohydrate source,” Tong says. “That tang will remind you of some aspects of cheese flavor. But the full complexity of, say, aged cow’s milk cheddar is hard to reproduce.”

There is a whiff of the ersatz about the new vegan cheeses. Cow’s milk cheeses acquire a golden hue as they age; cultured cashew purees, a faint gray. Keep Miyoko’s creamier cheeses at room temperature for a few hours and they leach oil. The texture is smooth, but nothing like Camembert or Gruyere.

And perhaps that’s all right. The new vegan cheese “isn’t trying to be something that it’s not,” says Rainbow’s Edgar. “(These new cheesemakers) are trying to coax flavors out of cashews as opposed to hiding the flavor of what they’re using.”

Tong’s doubts aside, Schinner’s cheeses do have tanginess and significant complexity. They deliver huge hits of umami, that mouth-filling savoriness that lures you into scattering an extra quarter-cup of Parmesan across your bowl of pasta.

The inaugural line from Miyoko’s Kitchen — close to a dozen products — is as diverse as Cowgirl Creamery’s. The Double-Cream Chive, for instance, has a lemony tang and smears across a slice of baguette like a hunk of fresh chevre. The firmer Aged English Smoked Farmhouse is a giant that strides across the palate and leaves footprints that endure far longer than you’d expect.

They’re just not cheese. But they do convey cheesiness. “I want that lingering flavor,” Schinner says. “I don’t want it to dissipate the minute you swallow it. I want you to walk away and still taste it.”

Miyoko’s Kitchen launched online sales on Sept. 5, a Friday. By the following Monday, the company had 500 orders. People all over the country weren’t just buying one cheese, they were buying collections of three or five, spending $30 to $100 at a time. An Australian distributor begged for a shipment. Whole Foods quickly stocked the cultured nut products in its Northern California stores.

Three months in, the staff is up to 20, working round-the-clock shifts. With more money and support than Now and Zen could ever find, Schinner is already looking at expanding into a second plant.

The Chronicle Food + Home staff tasted all of the local vegan cheeses on the market. These were our favorites:

Miyoko’s Kitchen: Double Cream Chive, Aged English Smoked Farmhouse, and the gouda-like High Sierra Rustic Alpine (pictured on the cover, at right), as well as limited-releases Winter Truffle and Loire Valley Fig Leaf. All available online at http://miyokoskitchen.com.

Fromagerie Essème: Original (pictured on the cover, at right) and garlic-herb cream cheese. Available at Republic of V, 1624 University Ave., Berkeley; and Rainbow Grocery, 1745 Folsom St., S.F.

Kite Hill: Ricotta as well as the Brie-like Soft Ripened. Available at Whole Foods stores nationwide.

On the cover

1. Miyoko’s Kitchen Mt. Vesuvius Black Ash

2. Miyoko’s Kitchen High Sierra Rustic Alpine

3. Kite Hill Soft Fresh Original

4. Fromagerie Essème plain cream cheese

5. Miyoko’s Kitchen country-Style Herbes de Provence

Cashew

Cream Cheese

Makes approximately 1 pound (3 cups)

Given the fat content of cashews, this cream cheese is unctuous and spreadable. The brand of yogurt that performed best for The Chronicle test kitchen was WholeSoy, commonly found at natural-foods stores. Adapted from “Artisan Vegan Cheese,” by Miyoko Schinner (Book Publishing Co., 2012).

2 cups raw cashews, soaked in water overnight

½ to 1 cup water, as needed

2 tablespoons plain, unsweetened soy yogurt

½ teaspoon kosher salt

Instructions: Put the cashews, ½ cup of the water, the soy yogurt and the salt in a blender. Process on high speed until smooth and creamy, occasionally stopping to scrape down the blender jar, about 4 minutes. If your blender isn’t powerful enough to puree the cashews, add the remaining ½ cup water.

Transfer to a clean glass bowl or container, cover and let rest at room temperature for 36 to 48 hours until the mixture achieves the desired tanginess; the culturing will proceed more quickly at warmer temperatures.

If you used the additional water to blend, transfer the cultured cheese to the center of a large square of cheesecloth, gather the edges together, then hang it in the refrigerator overnight to let the excess liquid drain.

Store in a covered container in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks. Or freeze for up to 4 months.